Olympian Mellisa Hollingsworth has barrels of fun with her off-season training

Thursday, May 16, 2013

By Gary Kingston, Vancouver Sun

Skeleton athlete Mellisa Hollingsworth has spent the off-season in Ledbetter, Tex., living and training with American barrel racing star Tammy Fischer.

Photographed by:Ted Rhodes, Calgary Herald

The off-season getaway for most winter sport athletes is often an extended stay at a sun-splashed beach in Hawaii or the Caribbean.

Accommodation is a first-class resort, or, in some cases, a tent or quaint hut on a secluded piece of Costa Rican coastline. A surfboard or a sailboat is frequently the ride of choice.

Skeleton racer Mellisa Hollingsworth, on the other hand, has spent the past six weeks in the heat and humidity of tiny Ledbetter, Tex., living out of a horse trailer parked on the ranch of American barrel racing star Tammy Fischer.

Her daily ride is one of the couple of dozen horses that need to be exercised. When she’s not riding, she’s cleaning out stalls and doing other chores.

The rolling lands of the 150-acre ranch are spectacular, but the only sand she sees is on the inside of the training ring. If she’s not riding the horses over the sand, she and boyfriend, Nick Cunningham, an American bobsledder, are riding bikes through it, trying to build the leg power so crucial on the start ramps in their winter sports.

The beach and a bikini, it seems, has nothing on the dusty rodeo ring, cowboy boots and jeans.

“It’s been amazing,” says Hollingsworth, an Eckville, Alta., native who will head back home to Airdrie in a week and a half. “I feel very refreshed.”

She drove her father’s trailer to Texas because “mine’s a little smaller.” Still, home on wheels is the definition of cosy, with the living quarters in front of the trailer’s horse stalls consisting of a bed up in the gooseneck, a small stove and a combination toilet/shower.

“I love it,” she says. “If I had the opportunity for this to be my life, I’d be pretty happy.”

The 32-year-old Hollingsworth, an Olympic bronze medallist in 2006 and a former World Cup overall champion, has a well-documented passion for rodeo and horses.

A couple of years ago, she resumed professional barrel racing in the summer. The sport was her original childhood dream before she discovered the thrill of sliding face-first down an ice-covered concrete chute.

She and Fischer, who has ridden often at the Calgary Stampede, have become fast friends in the last couple of years after Hollingsworth interviewed the American while working for CBC.

“She’s always bugging me about coming down and spending some time with her,” says Hollingsworth, who blew her final run at the 2010 Olympics, finishing fifth and leading to a tearful apology to Canadians for letting them down. “I really started to think about it this winter when my season kind of went downhill.”

She was second in the season-opening World Cup in Lake Placid, N.Y., in late November, but sickness and chronic fatigue made for a tough campaign. She didn’t have another podium the rest of the way and wound up eighth in the overall standings.

She believes much of her trouble last season was related to concussion symptoms after hitting the track roof while training at the Whistler Sliding Centre in October. But she says it could also be the cumulative effect of the whiplash motion during multiple runs down that demanding track.

“At the time, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal ... but I just never felt comfortable again on my sled. I just felt achy and anxious.”

But the headaches and ringing in her ears that she dealt with at times has gone away in the last few weeks. Healthy and motivated, she wants desperately to be in the medal hunt at Sochi.

“After the season was over, my coaches sat me down and said that it seemed like how I’d done things the last couple of years weren’t working. With an Olympic year ahead of us, we want to get you in your peak conditioning for when you’re at Sochi.

“They want to be supportive of my interest in rodeo and horses, but wanted to ensure I get in the proper training and therapy after some rest. We had a little bit of a compromise and with team training not starting until the middle of May, it allowed me to get the rodeo bug out of my system.”

Hollingsworth, who has been competing at events around Texas the last month, said she’s been “blown away” by the opportunity to work with some of Fischer’s top horses.

“It would be like me handing of my Olympic sled and runners to somebody passionate about sliding and saying ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ It’s a pretty neat experience and I’m learning so much about the mental side of things. I’m putting myself in a very competitive environment in something that’s a little different than skeleton.”

Hollingsworth says working with horses is like working with human beings.

“They have feelings, too, their own thoughts. It’s really interesting to watch how different horses and people will work together. It’s really cool to watch Tammy when she’s working with a troubled horse. She’s so talented. It’s incredible to see from her years and years of experience all the knowledge she has.”

That admiration works both ways.

“When you’re a competitor, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing,” says Fischer of mentoring Hollingsworth. “I’m at the top of my sport, but it doesn’t matter if it’s pitching quarters or running barrels, I want to win.

“She thinks that same way ... and you want to stay at that level. Here, she’s a little bit of a fish out of water, but we’re trying to get her to the top, competing against the best. She’s getting a lot out of it.”

Fischer also says the workout regimen of Hollingsworth and Cunningham the last few weeks is “kind of like the Rocky (movies).

“They’ve been doing a lot of racing across arenas in the sand, running up and down hills. A little bit of everything.”

The inside of Fischer’s home is something of a rodeo shrine, full of trophies, belt buckles, saddles and race bibs, many from the Calgary Stampede. The one piece of non-rodeo memorabilia hanging on the walls is the race bib Hollingsworth wore at the 2005 world championships in Calgary.

“I’ve got friends who come over and look at that and they say ‘I don’t even know her name,’” says Fischer. “’I say, ‘Google her.’ And then they’re like ‘Wow, she really is famous. She’s an Olympic medallist and a World Cup champion.’”